Sick Boy[s] Paddle Club↓

“Cutting One Eye Helps Female Shrimp Reproduce,” Said My Blind Date.

Nvying 女蝇

Translated by: Eva Yang

“But cut out one eye only. Sear it off with scalding tongs.”

It was my blind date Zhou speaking. He was peeling shrimp for me—though he wasn’t good at it. The bright red shells fell apart in his hands into jagged pieces, drifting down like coarse flakes.

“If you cut both, the female shrimp won’t really produce more eggs; she can’t survive on her own. Her melancholy can further spread to the others, making everything harder.”

Which was more terrifying: dying peeled alive, or living with one eye gouged out? Or perhaps blinded first, then boiled?

The shrimp heads glared sideways at me from Zhou’s plate. My appetite vanished.

My boss at work had set up Zhou and me, and he had been persistently pursuing me for over a month: with flowers, gifts, and even impeccably fulfilling every ridiculous request I deliberately made. I was astonished by how patiently he endured my unreasonable trials, yet I felt nothing for him. Nothing but tastelessness.

It was not because he was in any way too disappointing—his appearance was well-proportioned, his personality and job had both been approved by my boss and my parents. But I simply couldn’t tear my gaze away from his thick lips. “Chop them up, and they'll make a heaping dish,” Eileen Chang once described. Zhou’s lips were generous enough to feed a glutton for a year, but the meal had very little visual appeal: purple-blue veins showing through layers of mucosa and dead skin, a color suggestive of rot and mold.

I set down my chopsticks. Perhaps sensing the shift in my mood, or perhaps realizing the untimely brutality in what he had just said, Zhou quickly added: “The cutting is quick. It doesn’t hurt.”

“Have you been through it? How did you know?” I snapped.

“Right, right,” he said, smiling, pouring me some tea while quoting Zhuang Zhou, “we are not fish indeed.” [Zhuang Zhou: "You are not a fish, how do you know what fish enjoy?"]

I resented both the shrillness of his voice and his cowardice by not arguing back.

I stopped talking and let my vision drift from Zhou’s substantial lips to the round fish tank in the center of the restaurant—the tallest, most “musculine” guy in the room.

It was a restaurant in an old, established hotel. Twenty years ago, many college girls used to play the piano here in their long, white dresses. My father often brought me along to eat and “embrace the aesthetics.” I embraced very little, unfortunately, while my father’s action of embracing went way beyond that he later had an affair with one of them.

The date ended with my silence and a minor “hunger strike,” yet Zhou didn’t give up. No matter how hard I put him off, he never stopped pursuing. I claimed I was too busy with work, and he offered that if we entered into a relationship, I wouldn’t have to work anymore.

After a small mistake at work got me harshly scolded, Zhou asked for another date.

Just in time. What a perfect time to make things clear, I thought. Frustrated, I resolved to vent all my irritation on Zhou and left in style.

Yet I had to make up for my mistakes. By the time I finished, there was no time left to dress up. I even left my glasses at the office in haste. The only thing to be glad about was that Zhou still chose the hotel restaurant, which I knew somewhat well.

Without my glasses, I was practically blind.

Standing where the piano once stood, I watched the Boston lobsters facing their relatives across the fish tank, which, from afar, appeared to be only two large blue shapes.

“Hey.”

A  handsome man waved at me—faintly reminiscent of a celebrity I liked.

I scanned the room and confirmed that he was waving at me.

“Over here.”

Perhaps because of the blurred vision, his slightly higher pitch was cast in gentleness.

“This way.”

It finally dawned on me that this wasn’t a romantic encounter with some stranger. It was Zhou, and I suddenly panicked at my disheveled appearance. He didn’t seem to mind, though, complimenting me despite how messy I looked.

I couldn’t remember what we talked about at dinner. But I remembered how I stopped focusing on the fish tank and began staring at him. He peeled shrimp for me in an awkward but endearing way. I poured everything out to him, from my work frustrations to personal troubles, even nightmares from my childhood.

He listened.

He smiled and nodded.

He promised, “Be my girlfriend, and I’ll take care of you. You won’t have to tolerate all of this.”

His lips were so sexy.

I didn’t agree immediately, but I started seeing him more and more often.

I stopped wearing glasses on our dates, and each one became more enjoyable than the last.

My longing for him sometimes led me to skip work, and I was even caught by my boss several times. But he neglected it when he heard it was for Zhou.

He just stopped entrusting me with important tasks.

Our relationship progressed smoothly: engagement, marriage, and then children. Over time, his thick lips began to remind me of Angelina Jolie. When our child was born with similar lips, my affection grew even stronger.

I quit my job.

After putting the child to bed, I lay next to Zhou. I couldn’t sleep without him anymore,  surprisingly.

It was the first time I truly looked at him.

Since the day I met him, Zhou had never worn glasses. Yet on the sides of his nose were two faint indentations, the marks left by the nose pads of a pair of glasses.

Translator’s Note

Shrimp is a short yet exquisite story that the translator finds deeply appealing. Firstly published on the Chinese social media platform, the Rednote (Xiaohongshu). The metaphor of blindness as a figure for mental confusion or the absence of wisdom has a long literary lineage, dating back at least to Oedipus. A parallel contrast between “blindness of the eyes” and “blindness of the heart” has also long existed in Chinese Literature. The most striking moment, however, comes in the story’s final revelation, in which we learn that the heroine is not the only person who has lost her “glasses”. Her pursuer Zhou, too, is among the sightless. It raises unsettling questions regarding how much of Zhou’s pursuit of the protagonist is genuine affection, and how much springs from his own will. Might he, too, merely be another compliant part within the rules of the breeding pond?

Forty years after the implementation of China’s One-Child Policy, the country now confronts a rapidly aging population. In response, policy discourse has shifted sharply from subsidies for single-child families to incentives for a second child, and since 2025, an encouragement of three-child families. Yet this demographic anxiety confluences with other social transformations: the prolonged economic gloom following the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rise of a new wave of feminism across the Chinese internet. Young women have never been as cautious in their considerations of marriage and childbirth, even as society places renewed pressure on them to return to the domestic sphere and to reproduce. Voices like Zhou’s—hoping women might “not need to work” and instead take dating and marriage as their method of finding a final “home”—remain far from rare today. But when the heroine cannot even fall asleep without her husband, does she still possess a place of her own in the world? The story offers no answer.

As Simone de Beauvoir once wrote, “woman’s misfortune lies in being surrounded by nearly irresistible temptations.” Bait that comes too easily often conceals a sharp hook meant to drag us out of the water. And for the female shrimp, once torn from the rivers and streams, there is likely only one fate left: To wait in the tank, destined eventually to become someone’s meal.

Nvying (lit. "Lady Fly")

Entered a creative writing program with the firm resolve to become a writer, only to be told in the very first class by the professor: "Writers cannot be cultivated."